The sad thing for us is that we don’t get to see most of this because it’s a wee bit too far to zip over for an evening’s theatre. Happily, however, we can see him act in at least one play via YouTube!

This is a production of the short play “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives, directed by Mike Lion, a fellow Hampshire student. Tom was in a longer play directed by Mike last fall (“Force play”), which was Tom’s first theatre experience at Hampshire. This production of “Words, Words, Words” was for an advanced directing course Mike’s taking at Amherst College, and the play is actually set in a Physics lab on the Amherst campus.

I really like having it in a lab instead of on a stage (compare to numerous other versions on YouTube), and the use of actual typewriters and paper definitely adds significant depth. The stage versions I found on-line all tended to look significantly more “fake” (a weird thing to say about a play featuring three talking chimps) than setting it in the lab. I also think the understated costumes are a win here; some of the other productions on-line have some really weird costuming (tuxes, marionette-doll-style-dresses) that I found quite distracting. (Tom tells me that the playwright actually suggests such customs – weird.)

As WeatherGrrrl says, “Kidlet is way cool!!!!! Great monkey body posture. Very effective location. Definitely earned the requisite number of laughs to be considered successful.”

The Incident at Tower 37 from bitfilms.com.

Hampshire College was one of the schools Tom and I visited on our big tour of New England colleges last month, and we saw a bit of student animation as we passed through one of the buildings. While we were visiting with Lee Spector (a friend of mine who teaches at Hampshire), the film came up and he told us we could find it online at bitfilms.com. One of the things that most impressed us both about Hampshire was the incredible quality of the student work there, and the videos at bitfilms are wonderful examples. These animated shorts are directed by professor Chris Perry, who came to Hampshire from Pixar. You can definitely see his Pixar background, as the animation (which is truly splendid) is always in service of an interesting story, and the characters have wonderful depth despite the brevity of the films.

As well as “The incident at Tower 37”, I also definitely recommend their other two bitfilms shorts (“Catch” and “Displacement”), as well as the 2010 Hampshire student animation demo reel and independent Hampshire student films such as “Nick the Shoes” by William Colón. All really impressive stuff that sets the bar awfully high for everyone in academia.

I first heard about Glennie several years ago from a student, and I think I filed her (without any data and without hearing any of her work) in the “Novelty Act” category in my head. This film does a wonderful job of shattering that preconception – she is a remarkable talent with truly amazing rhythmic sense and control. More importantly, she has a real deftness to her playing and a wonderful response in her improvisation. I can imagine a person with good coordination learning to bang out patterns, but she has a subtlety and range that would be the envy of most musicians, and her improvisations with other musicians (e.g, Fred Frith, Ondekoza) is a joy to watch and to listen to.

Frith is a particularly apt pairing, as they both share a combination of power and gentle subtlety that make their improvisations together incredibly rich. There’s a CD of their improvisations on that day which has happily flown onto my wish list :-).

My only complaint about the film is really entirely unfair. I (and I suspect most people) would dearly love to better understand what her experience of music is, as it’s presumably quite different from that of hearing folk. As she says in the film, however, hearing people can’t typically give any helpful account of their experience of hearing, so it’s not terribly fair to expect her to give an account either. I happily take her point, but that doesn’t do anything to quell the rush of questions:

• Why does her music sound so “familiar”? Given that her experience of it is quite different, one might expect the music that she makes to have a somewhat alien feel, which it totally doesn’t (for me). I suspect that this is to a large degree a combination of her not going deaf until primary school (so she had significant experience of music as a hearing person) and her extensive “traditional” musical training after going deaf.
• How does she experience harmony and layering? Harmonics are, in some sense the really hard part of the game, and one might reasonably expect that her tactile experience of that layering to be quite different from my auditory experience of it, and I suspect that we could learn a lot about both hearing and tactile perception from exploring the similarities and differences here.

All really fine stuff, and definitely recommended.

I dug up this short film by Virgil Widrich after seeing Lessig use a bit of it in his TED talk, and it’s one of those amazing bits of hyper-obsessive homage that you just have to admire, even though you’re probably grateful that you’d never have the time for this sort of thing. Parts are a little long, and some of the tricks a bit obvious, but most of it is genuinely wonderful.

Great stuff, especially for all those major film buffs out there!

withall affirming that the Divel can take any shape, and speake plaine English
     — from the trial of Rebecca West

One of our activities when Dori was visiting two weeks ago was to visit Colchester castle, which I’d never been to. Like many such castles, it was used for much of its life as a prison, with the sort of horrid conditions typical of such places. One of the many unpleasant uses of this prison was for torture during witch trials. This included the torture of Rebecca West, a 15 year old girl that eventually confessed to having been “married” to the devil by the elder witches, and gave up her mother and numerous others, most of which were hanged. (There’s a transcript of the trial on-line, which includes the quote above.)

All quite creepy, especially since the U.S. government still believes that torture is a reasonable way to acquire meaningful information.

A few days ago WeatherGirl and I saw Eastern Promises and Rendition in a single night of light entertainment. (Plus all three of us saw an excellent stage production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus on Friday, so light and fluffies all around!) Eastern Promises was certificate 18 in the UK, while Rendition was 15. I understand those ratings and they make a fair amount of sense, but I personally found Rendition more disturbing, mostly because of the awful and futile torture. It’s so clear that the character in question, and very nearly any of us, would soon say whatever our examiners wanted to hear in a desperate effort to bring an end to the abuse. Under such circumstances, any information gathered is clearly valueless, making the whole process nothing more than a horrid exercise in the molestation of our fellow humans.

It was also tough because WeatherGirl’s not a U.S. citizen; her status is almost identical to that of the man that is kidnapped and tortured in the film. The two important differences are that she’s not African/Middle Eastern, and she’s female, but from a legal perspective she’s no more or less protected than he was. Sadly, though, when the rule of law breaks down almost entirely (as Our Fearless Leader has allowed to happen in many ways), questions of legal protection become irrelevant in the face of this cackling rush to the shackles and truncheon.

Morris is lucky to have a wonderful art deco movie theatre from the 1940’s that is still a single screen first run theatre. It went up for sale this summer, and there were concerns that we might lose our cinema. Happily, a group came together on fairly short notice (essentially over the weekend) that was able to make a successful offer on the theatre.

As one might guess from the photo, the theatre could use some rennovation, and some creative changes to the business model wouldn’t hurt either. Still, I was extremely impressed by the group’s enthusiasm for saving the theatre, and the creative energy at the meetings over the weekend.

People asked WeatherGirl to be on the Board of Directors for the theatre, but the fact that we’re leaving the country for a year in three weeks kind of killed that :-). We’re probably going to be setting up a web site for them, so I ran out and took a bunch of photos of the theatre, including this.

Despite Skatje‘s warnings (via PeeZed) about the crowds (or what passes for such here in sleepy Morris), we all saw Pirates of the Carribean 3 tonight.

By the time we saw the warning (great use of PeeZed’s blog!), Sub-Evil Boy had already headed out in an effort to stake out some front row seats for his friends. WeatherGirl and I figured we’d head over around 7:40pm and see what the lines were like. It was definitely busy for a Morris Theatre showing of a film, but certainly not too insanely crowded, so we went on in. Skatje and the two others behind the candy counter were looking pretty busy, though!

This film was definitely a vast improvement over the mess of the second film and quite enjoyable. Probably not as fresh and creative as the first Pirates, but we giggled our way through fair bits of it. I’m guessing that PeeZed will be well amused by several parts :-). The little crab rock thing was totally cool.

There’s a reason I’m not a critic. A critic would need to respond in something approximating sentences when seeing/hearing/whatever a new piece. I respond with various little explosions inside my head and lots of incoherent mumbling, especially if I really like the work. It’s hard to make critical essays out of little explosions (unless you’re Mark Kermode, in which case your explosions come complete with syntactic structure and hilarious examples), and people don’t really want to listen to/read my mumblings. So I wander around, distracted by the little explosions, mumbling to whoever will listen, until the explosions die down to the point where I can form complete sentences again on the subject at hand. Given that this has been known to take several years in extreme cases, timely and topical criticism isn’t really much of an option for me.

So you might want to look away, as I’m going to mumble for a while.

A week or so ago the truly wonderful Huck Brock (pictured here) loaned me the truly wonderful documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It took me a couple of days to gain access to the TV to watch it, but man was it worth it. A strange and amazing story that opens door on so many things, and a remarkably modern life, with a level of self-documentation not possible even a few decades earlier.

I’ve been a fan of Johnston for several years, but mostly indirectly. Kathy McCarty’s album Dead Dog’s Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston has been a super-fave of mine for many years, and I’ve got several covers of Daniel’s songs in various places that I love. I never actually bought one of his tapes when I lived in Austin, but I did play his stuff on my radio show when I lived there back in. Johnston’s work is prototypical lo-fi, for years recording and dubbing home-made cassettes, passing them out to anyone who would listen (and probably loads of people who didn’t).

For me he was always just this legend that people talked about, like Raul’s, but covers of his songs by bands like the Reivers were often the highlights of shows or albums, so I was certainly interested. I was lucky enough to see him when he played at the Austin Music Awards, although I had no idea until I watched this movie that he pulled the keys out of the plane home in mid-air, nearly killing himself and his father.

There’s so much that’s amazing in this story and this film, but I think one of the most remarkable things is how clearly this lays out the enormous challenges someone like Johnston present to the family, friends, and colleagues. Here we have a creative genius who can also be a serious threat to himself and others. People around him typically want to do “the right thing”, but it’s obviously not a simple thing to determine what that might be, especially when what’s good for Daniel, for Daniel’s art, and for those around Daniel aren’t always in alignment. His parents, for example, certainly aren’t always angels in this deal, but lord knows that they drew a damnedly tough hand.

I definitely recommend this film. You may or may not dig Daniel’s music and art, but this speaks to so many issues of art and culture, family and responsibility.

There is much that is worthy of praise in this, but I must put in a plug for the amazing camera work. The colors and image composition and focus work are all quite outstanding. I’d have a hard time pull that sort of stuff together in a single still shot, and they pulled it off in (moving) frame after frame. Wow.

• Courtesy of Alex Jarvis, this article on the MPAA being caught pirating a DVD. Their defense is apparently because it was important for their employees to be aware of the contents of the film in question. Somehow it doubt that would cut much ice in court if I argued that it was “important for my students” to have illegal copies of a book, CD, or DVD. Hmmmm…
• Courtesy of Pharyngula, Cory Doctorow visited the Nature offices to talk about the lots of stuff, with a focus on the use of the web in writing and promoting his books.
• The Doctorow piece has a pointer to an interesting Tim O’Reilly article entitled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” which, among other things, has the great line “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”. Not quite the same tune that the MPAA and RIAA typically sing.